A journey in words...

Welcome to my journey in words! A story about health, exercise, weight loss, food addiction, humor, size discrimination, sarcasm, social commentary and all the rest that’s rattling around inside my head...

I now twit, er... or tweet. Anyway, you can follow me on twitter @Aeon1202

Thursday, July 14, 2016

The Irony of David Wolfe & the Avocado

Recently I was discussing my favorite food, the avocado, with a friend –
and he pointed out that the avocado does not actually make sense in the human
diet.

Curious, I asked why, and he explained that as a fruit it doesn’t work with
us the way it biologically should. It has a seed that is far too large for a
human animal to swallow and later deposit with a convenient pile of fertilizer
to grow elsewhere. In fact, the avocado’s golf ball sized seed is actually
poisonous to human beings.

I then inquired as to what type of animal was supposed to be eating the
avocado, and he replied with ground sloths, an extremely large, now extinct
type of land mammal also known as megatherium. I did a bit more research and
turned up this interesting article.

That's a big sloth...

After the disaster that caused the ground sloths and other megafauna to
die off, avocados survived against all odds probably getting spread about by smaller
animals like big cats for a while until being discovered by us primates who
began deliberately spreading their seeds and farming them for their deliciousness.

Not only did we farm them, we genetically modified the heck out of them.
The avocados that megafauna used to eat were much more seed than flesh and we’d
likely barely recognize them from our gator pears of today. We’ve manipulated
the avocado to make it produce a much smaller seed with much more delicious
green stuff for us to feast upon.

This led me to thinking about David Wolfe...

One of my least favorite modern snake oil salesmen is named David “Avocado”
Wolfe. I’m not going to link to his site because I don’t want to send him any
traffic, but feel free to peruse this article about him. In short, he’s a food
scaremongerer who sells an unhealthy dose of orthorexia along with sham products
on his website like “David Wolfe Nutrition Certifications” that help you
convince people that genetic modification of food is evil and bad for you
despite their being no hard scientific evidence of this (and yes, I have looked for it), vaccinations are deadly, and chocolate is “an octave of sun energy
that lines up planetarily with the sun”… or something. He’s right up there with
the Food Babe when it comes to anti-science hokum. And this stuff can be
deadly, particularly the anti-vaccines part.

It always annoyed me that he calls himself David “Avocado” Wolfe,
because I love the avocado but I do not like him very much. One of the only
things he and I agree on is that the avocado is both delicious and healthy to
eat, but he pollutes its goodness by attaching it to his name.

The gorgeously ironic part is this:

David Wolfe has named himself after a food that has a poisonous seed,
which should have become extinct along with the creatures that ate it thousands
of years ago, and he is apparently ignorant of the fact that it was
artificially preserved through exactly the kind of genetic modification and
deliberate human food tinkering that he espouses to be “toxic.”